Wedge

Thanks.

Err who are you already? :P

Yeah, forking SMF is a huge endeavour, and it's interesting to note that of the 8 or so forks we noticed, there's only two that can claim to be active still - and we're the furthest along of those.

I am nend, that is all anyone needs to know.Those are the ones that are announced.

I remember seeing your work around sm.org, some very interesting ideas.But of the 8 that were announced, all but 2 have basically fallen quite early on for one reason or another; it's a *huge* task. And I still would argue that we're the furthest along in development out of the SMF forks since 2.0 went fork-legal.[1]

Do I get the impression then that you're working on a fork?

1.	Though I'm well aware we had several months' head start because we forked privately before RC4 came out and synced changes as we went.

I wouldn't be able to handle the stress, I know I am capable of whipping one up but there is a support issue. I don't handle user support request all that great. Even though trying to keep a calm temper, I just want to lash out.

I do that anyway, even now. Predominantly it's the people that complain about not having 'Wedge right now' or wanting to know where they can download it without bothering to notice that it isn't for download at present.

Now, I know I can handle the support load, I certainly was able to cope with a decent chunk of SMF's for the time I was on the team, and I know Wedge far better than I knew SMF's code back then. So it does come back to temper and so on.

Mind you, there is one important difference between my position with Wedge and my position with SMF... if something is obviously broken in Wedge, I'm going to fix it, and by 'broken' I don't just mean 'actively buggy'.

My favourite examples of this are:
* return to topic after posting
* OMG people can see topics they're not supposed to be able to on Who's Online

The return to topic after posting is one of those things I never really quite understood why it was so important. But it is important for many people. Now, given how many people ask about it on sm.org, you'd start to wonder why no-one ever thought of making it the default. But from what I remember, it was suggested and shot down for some reason. I have no idea why, I think it would be a sensible thing to make a default for.

As for the who's online thing, I know precisely why it's done that way - you as an admin can see every topic. Consequently, you can see all the topic titles. But the user can't, if they can't see the topic. So you have to reassure people about this.

Now, there's three ways you can deal with this situation. You can do what SMF does, and regularly reassure people that it's all good. You could go a step further and document it in the manual, and link people to it when they ask, something I hope will happen with the wiki, but I don't know. Or you could actually go a step further and attempt to fix it. I came up with a solution prior to starting on Wedge, I even discussed it with Norv at the time, and the best I got was a polite 'hmm, interesting'. So naturally, I added it to Wedge without any hesitation![1]

This is something that appeals to me as a developer: if someone keeps asking about something, it suggests there's a problem, so instead of explaining it, fix it so it doesn't need explaining.

The ultimate goal is to make the software not require much in the way of general support, so that support issues are for real bugs and genuine problems, not software-usability created issues (which is a *significant* factor in SMF's support area right now)

1.	Specifically, if the user has an error, log that fact in the online log, so when you go to the who's online page, you can see that a user was trying to do something but got a warning when doing so.

I just want to add this in, a bit off topic though but here I go. For one of my SMF 2.0.2 sites I coded in support for admin privileges per user basis for individual boards and their children. I set this in the admin panel per board in the manage board section and the board admin can edit their boards and add and remove children in the mod center.

Is this something that may be considered or all ready implemented in Wedge?

It's not implemented currently (at least, I don't remember it being implemented currently!) however, there is a column in the boards table called id_owner, which has that purpose in mind.

For the most part, really, we're talking about properly managing the admin panel UI and permissions for that, rather than anything else, since pretty much everything else will fall into place pretty naturally.

That said, there's still plenty to do in the board configuration, making that properly extensible for one, and finishing off all the tendrils attached to the board permissions setup we have (it's possible to handle allow/no-allow/deny permissions for both viewing and entering a board, per group, all independently of each other, and the UI is built for the board's own configuration, but not anywhere else where groups can be configured with a list of boards, yay)

I know at least one which was never announced.I see uses for something like that, and not just for multiple blog support.